According to rumors from the "pit", computer analogs are now trading the vast majority of the action we see. In the event of a "meltdown", the computer action would get shut off and you may very well have a case of "no bid" on any tradeable entity including most "funds" of folks savings entities.

What this means is that since banks are SO LEVERAGED RIGHT NOW (they are way past bankrupt), the value you see on your account is actually FICTITIOUS and could be wiped to "0" in an instant. This can happen when there is "no live body" in the trading pit to give a bid to buy your funds and this means "no bid" which drops that stock to "0" value, which is much closer to the true value anyway.

This kind of thing happending en masse is a very real possibility and would give financial institutions a "way out" of and "unsecured" funds, in other words they would love to NOT HAVE TO PAY on these funds and do it legally. This is how you can be legally dropped to zero overnight.

You thought getting whacked HALF in 2008/2009 was bad?... The only modest protection you have is "cash in hand" and anything you could guarantee as a "secure entity" (not many of these exist now). The buying power of cash would also be greatly diminished in such an emergency, but something is better than nothing.

According to rumors from the "pit", computer analogs are now trading the vast majority of the action we see. In the event of a "meltdown", the computer action would get shut off and you may very well have a case of "no bid" on any tradeable entity including most "funds" of folks savings entities.

What this means is that since banks are SO LEVERAGED RIGHT NOW (they are way past bankrupt), the value you see on your account is actually FICTITIOUS and could be wiped to "0" in an instant. This can happen when there is "no live body" in the trading pit to give a bid to buy your funds and this means "no bid" which drops that stock to "0" value, which is much closer to the true value anyway.

This kind of thing happending en masse is a very real possibility and would give financial institutions a "way out" of and "unsecured" funds, in other words they would love to NOT HAVE TO PAY on these funds and do it legally. This is how you can be legally dropped to zero overnight.

You thought getting whacked HALF in 2008/2009 was bad?... The only modest protection you have is "cash in hand" and anything you could guarantee as a "secure entity" (not many of these exist now). The buying power of cash would also be greatly diminished in such an emergency, but something is better than nothing.

According to rumors from the "pit", computer analogs are now trading the vast majority of the action we see. In the event of a "meltdown", the computer action would get shut off and you may very well have a case of "no bid" on any tradeable entity including most "funds" of folks savings entities.

What this means is that since banks are SO LEVERAGED RIGHT NOW (they are way past bankrupt), the value you see on your account is actually FICTITIOUS and could be wiped to "0" in an instant. This can happen when there is "no live body" in the trading pit to give a bid to buy your funds and this means "no bid" which drops that stock to "0" value, which is much closer to the true value anyway.

This kind of thing happending en masse is a very real possibility and would give financial institutions a "way out" of and "unsecured" funds, in other words they would love to NOT HAVE TO PAY on these funds and do it legally. This is how you can be legally dropped to zero overnight.

You thought getting whacked HALF in 2008/2009 was bad?... The only modest protection you have is "cash in hand" and anything you could guarantee as a "secure entity" (not many of these exist now). The buying power of cash would also be greatly diminished in such an emergency, but something is better than nothing.

According to rumors from the "pit", computer analogs are now trading the vast majority of the action we see. In the event of a "meltdown", the computer action would get shut off and you may very well have a case of "no bid" on any tradeable entity including most "funds" of folks savings entities.

What this means is that since banks are SO LEVERAGED RIGHT NOW (they are way past bankrupt), the value you see on your account is actually FICTITIOUS and could be wiped to "0" in an instant. This can happen when there is "no live body" in the trading pit to give a bid to buy your funds and this means "no bid" which drops that stock to "0" value, which is much closer to the true value anyway.

This kind of thing happending en masse is a very real possibility and would give financial institutions a "way out" of and "unsecured" funds, in other words they would love to NOT HAVE TO PAY on these funds and do it legally. This is how you can be legally dropped to zero overnight.

You thought getting whacked HALF in 2008/2009 was bad?... The only modest protection you have is "cash in hand" and anything you could guarantee as a "secure entity" (not many of these exist now). The buying power of cash would also be greatly diminished in such an emergency, but something is better than nothing.

OP is right about this being the most serious threat to the whole system. People have been writing about it for a few years now.

Its just like the supply chain system with supermarkets etc. The same principles really - in the name of efficiency all redundancies have been eliminated. This is super dooper when everything works 'as it should' but one tiny little spanner in the works and everything falls apart.

With high velocity trading, ie. the computer driven trading that does millions of trades in a millisecond, the speed and severity of such crisis are magnified greatly.

All it will take is something to spook the system. The collapse will happen so quickly that Bloomberg presenters will already be spewing out meaningless garbage about the past when the breaking news flashes up.

Don't put too much faith in this. Whilst gold and silver have had a certain stability to them in the past because they are a physical and scarce 'real thing', they won't save any of us from the future. The system is so out of whack, and the issues driving it all are so vast and detached from any conceivably sustainable system that it will still fall apart.

You see what most people are not factoring in is that there are hundreds of millions of disenfranchised younger people (by younger I mean forty and younger) right across the western world who really couldn't give a crap about the security of Boomer's investments. When the reality of their future finally dawns on them those people will rip this society limb-from-limb in a violent convulsion of rage and despair. It won't matter if you have gold assets or silver because the entire fabric of the system, and its infrastructure is going to be destroyed.

The only questions really left are when will the spark come that ignites the inferno, what alternative ideologies will present themselves and vie for power, and how long will the chaos last?

Turn on CNBC any particular morning these days and they're talking about algo trading.

The retail investor is largely out of the market now, which is why you can't count on the stock market as a metric of economic health. There isn't an answer to a problem to be found here.

We have one trader at work that deals with all our hedging and positioning, and while he is physically (I.e. clicking a button) trading positions forUs and there's someone on the other end taking the risk from us, the likely scenario is a computer takes the position and trades for us in the end.

Capitalism revolves around debt. All the manufacturing and services and other forms of value adding require vast amounts of debt to cater for the sheer volume of exchange. Without debt, capitalism would grind to a halt and growth would end. Banks simply facilitate this process and the markets are their venue of value amplification, similar to a shopkeepers retail premium on wholesale. The fact that it is all appearing shaky has less to do with it being the actions of bad people but rather the fact that the sheer momentum of these activities are reaching such a pitch that they threaten to overwhelm the system.

But to suggest that debt can somehow be made more acceptable is to vastly misunderstand the nature of the system we live within.

I personally see no point in getting into a froth about things. The system will eventually exhaust itself...not whilst countries such as India and China are entering the system however and not in our lifetimes.

Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Don't put too much faith in this. Whilst gold and silver have had a certain stability to them in the past because they are a physical and scarce 'real thing', they won't save any of us from the future. The system is so out of whack, and the issues driving it all are so vast and detached from any conceivably sustainable system that it will still fall apart.

You see what most people are not factoring in is that there are hundreds of millions of disenfranchised younger people (by younger I mean forty and younger) right across the western world who really couldn't give a crap about the security of Boomer's investments. When the reality of their future finally dawns on them those people will rip this society limb-from-limb in a violent convulsion of rage and despair. It won't matter if you have gold assets or silver because the entire fabric of the system, and its infrastructure is going to be destroyed.

The only questions really left are when will the spark come that ignites the inferno, what alternative ideologies will present themselves and vie for power, and how long will the chaos last?

With the leveraging right now THERE IS NOT ENOUGH LABOR IN THE ENTIRE WORLD to account for even a fraction of the USD in circulation as electrons....this is DANGEROUS!

Quoting: Anonymous Coward 19514200

Good point! So in other words, there is insufficient surplus value to soak up the brought forward losses being generated by leveraging. Of course, automation and wage reduction is what will take the hit....to an extent. Where the risk lies is in global inventory eventually taking a deflationary nosedive as businesses compete into extinction in a bid to survive in this environment. However, I take your point that the extent of the leverage is the start of a decline in the systems capacity.

Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!